Mind games at work (From The Oxford Times)

Mind games at work

5:00pm Thursday 14th August 2008 in Profiles By Chris Koenig

They may not know it themselves, but many of the people in USA who enforce the law of the land undergo psycholgical screening for their jobs - using tests controlled by an Oxford firm.

Business psychologists, OPP, who employ about 150 people at their high-tech north Oxford office, and another 35 worldwide, use psychometric tests - or instruments as they are called in the jargon - to find out whether such personnel as police, prison guards, or airport security officers are likely to have an "attitude" problem.

Now similar tests are also being widely used in the retail business to find out the likely honesty, or otherwise, of employees in positions of trust, such as those who handle cash.

But chief executive and founder of the business, Dr Robert McHenry, was quick to point out that the company cannot simply transport techniques that work well in one country to another - say from USA to Britain.

He said: "One of our major expenses is investigating "norm data" for different cultures, or in different countries. The instruments have to be tailored to particular norms."

Dr McHenry, who besides his role at OPP also teaches at Oriel College, Oxford, first realised that there was a demand for using psychometric tests for screening job applicants after he came to Oxford from his native Northern Ireland in the late 1970s.

He said: "My supervisor Michael Argyle were training people who interviewed others for jobs. I remember someone in the Canadian Aluminium company, Alcan, then in Banbury told me about them."

Now the firm, which last year achieved a £22m turnover, is continuing to expand, apparently defying the credit crunch. Its last six months' results to June 2008 show a 25.8 per cent increase upon the same period last year and the company is anxious to take on more staff.

Head of Marketing, Lucy McGee, said: "We are increasing our IT staff from nine up to 34. We also need project managers, and admin and client support people."

And on top of that the firm, which already has offices in Dublin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Chicago, Champaign crrct (Illinois), and Copenhagen will be recruiting staff for the new Munich office, scheduled to open next year.

To anyone wondering what is wrong with the age-old method of selection - namely simply employing a person with the right qualifications for the job and with whom you get on well - Dr McHenry has this to say: "We always tell interviwers to beware of this. The trouble is that our initial hunches are so unreliable. That is why a more objective system is needed."

He added: "Making a mistake is terribly expensive too. Summarily sacking someone can cost the equivalent of a whole year's salary - after you have paid the agency fees of up to 30 per cent, and then dealt with the compensation package on top of that.

"Against that, our fees are tens, or at most hundreds of pounds. Not thousands."

Certainly Britain's top companies use science, rather than hunches, when choosing their key players. About 80 of the FTSER 100 firms use OPP tests.

Broadly speaking interviewers sifting job applicants need, firstly, insights into a candidate'spersonality, and secondly, their ability to do the job.

In the first case the questions probe a person's character to find out, for instance, whether they are extravet or introvert, or persuasive, or dominant, or emotionally stable. Dr McHenry said that candidates find it "immensely hard" to fake answers. For instance the fact that someone frequently "worries themselves to sleep at night" might well be a positive response (since some intelligent people are apt to "sleep on problems" as a way of resolving them) - even though the candidate might well expect the opposite to be true.

As to questions about a person's ability to do the job on offer, Dr McHenry said that a lot, in the final analysis comes down to sheer brain power, but that verbal and numeracy skills flowed from that, as did an ability for abstract thought.

Scary stuff. But surely it is the company's own credibility which, in the end, is on test? How does Dr McHenry convince personnel officers that his tests are worth the paper they are written on?

He said: "At first that was my role: job analysis and tailoring instruments to suit jobs. Now we have psychologist-consultants worldwide to do that."

The company also has European rights to the famous Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a psychometric test developed back in 1975 by mother and daughter team Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, which is still the most widely used personality assessment in the world with 3.5m individual tests taken each year.

Step One of the MBTI endeavours to give individuals an understanding of their own and others' personality 'type', while Step Two breaks that information down into into five facets, to give a more detailed appreciation of their type.

OPP stasff believe that this approach can highlight how people of the same Step I type can be different, and explore the similarities between people with contrasting Step I preferences. It is particularly used for leadership development and executive coaching.

The Oxford company also has worldwide rights to the Cattell 16 Personality Factor (16PF) test, probably the next most-used instrument for categorising and defining personality.

Based on 16 key factors, such as rule-consciousness (how much reliance you place on externally inflicted rules), or warmth (your desire to form close relationships with others) it was originally developed in 1949 and has been gathering pace ever since.

But two questions for the questioner remained in my mind: firstly, do Oxford academics, say at Oriel College, ever do these tests on one other? Answer from Dr McHenry: "Rarely."

Secondly: if our subjective judgement about other people is so ropy that we have to introduce more objective means of assessing each other, should we not use such tests when performing the most important selective process in human life, namely selecting a mate? After all, most of us rely on hunch for that.

Dr McHenry said: "We tend to know each other for rather longer than just an interview when we make that selection."